Python3, MySQL, and SqlAlchemy -- does SqlAlchemy always require a DBAPI? - mysql

Question

I am in the process of migrating databases from sqlite to mysql. Now that I've migrated the data to mysql, I'm not able to use my sqlalchemy code (in Python3) to access it in the new mysql db. I was under the impression that sqlalchemy syntax was database agnostic (i.e. the same syntax would work for accessing sqlite and mysql), but this appears not to be the case. So my question is: Is it absolutely required to use a DBAPI in addition to Sqlalchemy to read the data? Do I have to edit all of my sqlalchemy code to now read mysql?
The documentation says: The MySQL dialect uses mysql-python as the default DBAPI. There are many MySQL DBAPIs available, including MySQL-connector-python and OurSQL, which I think means that I DO need a DBAPI.
My old code with sqlite successfully worked like this with sqlite:
engine = create_engine('sqlite:///pmids_info.db')
def connection():
conn = engine.connect()
return conn
def load_tables():
metadata = MetaData(bind=engine) #init metadata. will be empty
metadata.reflect(engine) #retrieve db info for metadata (tables, columns, types)
inputPapers = Table('inputPapers', metadata)
return inputPapers
inputPapers = load_tables()
def db_inputPapers_retrieval(user_input):
result = engine.execute("select title, author, journal, pubdate, url from inputPapers where pmid = :0", [user_input])
for row in result:
title = row['title']
author = row['author']
journal = row['journal']
pubdate = row['pubdate']
url = row['url']
apa = str(author+' ('+pubdate+'). '+title+'. '+journal+'. Retrieved from '+url)
return apa
This worked fine and dandy. So then I tried to update it to work with the mysql db like this:
engine = create_engine('mysql://snarkshark#localhost/pmids_info')
At first when I tried to run my sample code like this, it complained because I didn't have MySqlDB. Some googling around informed me that MySqlDB does NOT work for Python 3. So then I tried pip installing pymysql and changing my engine statement to
engine = create_engine('mysql+pymysql://snarkshark#localhost/pmids_info')
which also ends up giving me various syntax errors when I try to adjust things.
So what I want to know, is if there is any way I can get my current syntax to work with mysql? Since the syntax is from sqlalchemy, I thought it would work perfectly for the exact same data in mysql that was previously in sqlite. Will I have to go through and update ALL of my db functions to use the syntax of the DBAPI?

Answer 1

This will sound like a dumb answer, but you'll need to change all the places where you're using database-specific behavior. SQLAlchemy does not guarantee that anything you do with it is portable across all backends. It leaks some abstractions on purpose to allow you to do things that are only available on certain backends. What you're doing is like using Python because it's cross-platform, then doing a bunch of os.fork()s everywhere, and then being surprised that it doesn't work on Windows.
For your specific case, at a minimum, you need to wrap all your raw SQL in text() so that you're not affected by the supported paramstyle of the DBAPI. However, there are still subtle differences between different dialects of SQL, so you'll need to use the SQLAlchemy SQL expression language instead of raw SQL if you want portability. After all that, you'll still need to be careful not to use backend-specific features in the SQL expression language.